


Truth Becomes The Lie You Tell

by Fiercest



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Dysfunctional Family, F/F, Gen, Happy Ending, M/M, Nobody dies I swear, Pining, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:28:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25637335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fiercest/pseuds/Fiercest
Summary: Quynh finds Booker in Paris. He leads her to the family, in a shack on a quiet Newfoundland beach."You didn't kill me," Andy swears to Quynh. What’s one more lie?
Relationships: Andy | Andromache & Booker | Sebastien & Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf & Nicky | Nicolò, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 21
Kudos: 536





	Truth Becomes The Lie You Tell

**Author's Note:**

> so..... I'm obsessed with this movie. It's so extremely my shit. 95% of this was written at 3am immediately after finishing the movie. Enjoy <3

Booker has been sentenced to a hundred years of solitude, but his family are not the only ones enforcing this punishment. He could find them, if he tried. He is excellent at what he does; the only one among them who keeps ahead of the technological curve. The others can use cellphones and laptops, but for the most part they’re ten years behind everyone else.

Nile being the exception, of course.

Looking for them would be bad form. They wanted a hundred years of space, that’s not so much. But by the time he gets there it will be a third of his life. He used to be the baby, what is a lifetime to him, is a sabbatical to Joe and Nicky—a blink to Andy. Nile might be green enough to miss him.

Maybe this is why he does it. Maybe he was searching for an excuse all along.

Broken glass, crunching under his heels, he holds a gun to the stranger in his apartment and knows her instantly. He’s dreamed of her.

Quynh is a ghost in red, come to haunt him with a request he could never deny. “Booker, it’s nice to finally meet you.” Perhaps she dreamed of him too.

Her anger burns up all the air in the room. Five hundred years at the bottom of the ocean and here she is. He won’t blame her. Booker has been free every day of his 218 years except for three and he is destitute. He sold out his only allies—his only family—for the chance to die.

Her sleeves are long, they go past her wrists and he’s sure there are weapons concealed there. Not that it matters. Gait sure, she approaches him slowly and discards the water glass on the rim of his shitty, clogged sink.

Booker has a lot of questions, the least of which is: how did she find him? He hid himself poorly. Any amateur could unearth his dissipated self in the Parisian gutter. The more astounding story would be how she emerged from the ocean, Andromache’s Aphrodite. Other questions: What does she want? Is she sane? Who is all of this anger directed at? Is it anger at all?

He must remember that he is very drunk and he does not know this woman. She is the tragic heroine of a fairy tale he’s heard so often that it becomes real. He doesn’t owe her shit. She is one of them, but she is not family the way the others are.

Then again, that means she’s probably not mad at _him_.

.

.

The family doesn’t always stay together. Everyone needs their space. But nobody knows how long Andy has, so they stay close by.

They cannot spend every moment fighting.

Newfoundland in the summer is lush and green. The wind coming off the ocean is a forceful and welcome cold. They walk along the shore, ankle deep in the Atlantic and enjoy the simple pleasure of soft pebbles underfoot. There is a house, far away from any other houses. There is no indoor plumbing and they have an outhouse, but every single one of them is used to roughing it, so nobody minds.

Nobody uses the word vacation, but it’s what it is.

Nile’s from Chicago; she has no idea how to swim. So Joe offered to teach her. It’s not going well because she refuses to float her feet off the ocean floor. “You can’t drown!” Joe exclaims, exasperated. The water is only waist deep.

“My self-preservation instincts don’t know that!”

“Don’t be dramatic!”

Which of course, sets off some incredulous sputtering on Nile’s part. Of the two of them, she is _not_ the dramatic one.

In the surf, Andy and Nicky lean against each other. Andy watches the swim lesson and Nicky reads a novel, his thumb creasing the book open. It’s a very modern literary novel. Wonderful romance, extreme amounts of yearning for him to relate to. The lovely thing about immortality is that it allowed him to 1) become literate and 2) read more books than any one human being could have in one lifetime.

Soon, the sun sets behind the trees and Nile refuses to let Joe swing her around in the waves any longer. Soon there won’t be enough light to read. By mutual agreement, they pack up their things and start the short trek back to the house.

They notice something’s wrong from afar. There is an extra car parked beside their station wagon. No one needs to say a word, they form a human shield in front of Andy, who gets prickly about it. Weapons are pulled from the recesses of totes, unrolled from blankets, out of pockets.

Nile checks the car. It’s empty. “Clear,” she tells them.

Andy uses this opportunity to rocket up the steps to the front door. She kicks off her sandals at the bottom so her footfalls are silent.

She always goes first.

Gun cocked, she bursts through the door, ready to open fire.

Booker and Quynh are waiting for them.

Andy’s gasp is choked and horrible. Her eyes well and her hands shake so much she has to lower the gun. She is at a complete loss for words.

The rest of the group are only seconds behind her. They see Booker first. Then they register Quynh beside him. Joe’s sob is loud and instantaneous. Nicky rears back. Nile takes a step forward and glances sideways at Andy, who stays very _very_ still.

“Quynh.” Sigh and supplication, greeting and mourning. Andy is a warrior queen in a neon green swimsuit and jorts, brought to her knees.

In five easy steps Quynh is in front of her and the blade in her hand slips between her ribs. “Five hundred years and you still couldn’t find me?” she spits, even as she’s the only thing holding her upright.

Andy’s lips bow in an airless gasp.

All at once, there’s shouting from every direction. Booker rips Quynh away and locks her arms behind her back as screams. “You and I until the end? Where were you?! I cried for you and you never came!”

“Get her away!” Joe commands, laying Andy gently on the floor. Quynh took the knife with her. It’s a ripped, open wound in her side and with the way Andy’s gasping, her lung’s collapsed. “My love, there’s a first aid kit in the kitchen. Go!”

Nicky runs. Nile keeps her gun trained on Quynh and Booker.

Andy’s voice is reedy and wet as she contends with what just happened. “I’m s-sorry,” she swears, crying. “I’m so sorry Quynh, I looked for you. I looked for you. I swear I did.”

“What are you doing?” Quynh thrashes against Booker’s hold. “What- what’s wrong? Why isn’t she healing?”

Andy makes a noise that might be a laugh, “Why now?” No one knows who’s she speaking to. The universe? God? “I just got you back, why now?”

“Andromache, why aren’t you healing?!”

“Booker, let her go.” He hesitates. “I said let her go!” Andy’s the boss. He does as she says.

Quynh, furious and avenging, trips to her side and takes her hand. “Andromache, I didn’t mean it, I was mad. I didn’t think-“

“You couldn’t have known.”

“I’ve just come back, you can’t leave me. I’ve found you. I’ve found you, I’m sorry.”

“ _I’m_ sorry.”

She takes her hand and presses it to her own cheek. Blood smears her fingerprints across her skin, branding her forever and she doesn’t care, she can’t. Andromache is somehow dying. None of them have died since Lykon.

“I didn’t think you would die,” Quynh cries. Andy understands. They take death so much more seriously now than they used to; dying for frivolous causes. Dying for a joke. Dying to make a point in an argument.

On her other side, Nicky has the stomach to stick his fingers into Andy’s wound to check for internal damage. He frowns at what he finds. There’s a bottle of disinfectant in the first aid kit, he pours it over the kitchen knife he pilfered from one of the drawers. “This is gonna hurt Boss.” Before he’s finished speaking he plunges the knife in. There’s the _hiss_ of air escaping and Andy starts breathing a little more normally.

“Will you _stop that_ ,” she demands.

“Do you want to live or not,” Joe points out.

A whine and the _thunk_ of her head against the floor, “Shut uuup.”

“Andromache,” Quynh pulls attention back to her. It’s not hard. After so long without her, all Andy wants is to stare at her face. If she dies and it’s the last thing she sees, fine, so be it. It would be better not to die at all though.

Andy doesn’t want to die anymore. With her family all around her, and the missing piece of her heart finally home, there is so much to live for. Why do they never get a choice? Why isn’t about when they’re ready?

She is older than many civilizations and there has been no rest, no full night sleep in hundreds of years. She was supposed to die with no regrets. She was supposed to accept it. She was supposed to leave the world better than she found it and have that be enough.

But it’s not. She wants what she used to have. She could be happy again if she lives. Quynh might forgive her, there’s hope. Nile is just getting started, she wants to see it. There are more lives to save and more doors to walk through first.

“You didn’t kill me,” Andy swears to Quynh. What’s one more lie?

It’s not really a lie anyway. Everyone spends their life dying, hers is just a more protracted sentence than most.

Truth becomes the lie she tells because before their very eyes, the stitches Nicky has been very carefully putting in, fall out. Andy’s skin knits together on its own.

Maybe if they want to live, they’ll never die.


End file.
